Many local area network (LAN) products today use a medium formed by copper wire pairs for the transmission and reception of data. A network that used the copper wire pairs is defined as a copper based network. Existing technology based on the copper wire pairs include, for example, 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, and 1000BASE-T. All of these technologies have the ability to negotiate speed, duplex mode (half duplex or full duplex), flow-control, and other important aspects of a link operation by using low frequency pulses to communicate the desired state of operation for the link prior to actually engaging in the specific link signaling. This negotiation process is called “auto-negotiation”.
During link negotiation between two nodes in a link in a network, for example, a port of a first node may be set in the auto-negotiation mode, while a port of the second node is not set in the auto-negotiation mode. As a result, the first node may be made to negotiate at half-duplex, while the second node may be set to full-duplex. For example, the first node (which is in auto-negotiation mode) may be set to negotiate at 100 half-duplex or full-duplex, while the second node (which is not in auto-negotiation mode) may be set (by a forced setting) to 100 full-duplex. This creates a duplex operation mismatch (duplex mismatch) as the port in auto-negotiation mode will link in half duplex as per the standard.
As known to those skilled in the art, full-duplex data transmission means that data can be transmitted in both directions on a signal carrier at the same time. For example, on a local area network with a technology that has full-duplex transmission, one workstation can be sending data on the line while another workstation is receiving data. As also known to those skilled in the art, half-duplex data transmission means that data can be transmitted in both directions on a signal carrier, but not at the same time. For example, on a local area network using a technology that has half-duplex transmission, one workstation can send data on the line and then receive data on the line once its data has been received by the link partner.
The above-mentioned duplex operation mismatch (where one node is set to half-duplex and the other node is set to full-duplex) can lead to degraded performance between the two nodes. The degraded performance may manifest as a slower network connection with frequent errors and collisions.
The degraded performance often results in trouble calls by the customer to the network support center of a node vendor. In a 10BASE-T/100BASE-T network, duplex mismatch problems are typically the most fielded calls by support engineers from customers and is thus the most costly product issue.
Conventional technology does not provide the ability for the customer to know, detect and correct a duplex mismatch condition. Hence, conventional technology does not reduce the countless support calls to the support engineers from customers and does not lead to reductions in costs for the node vendor.
A conventional port configuration method from Cisco Corporation merely provides settable flags that indicate network error. However, this previous port configuration method does not provide specific guidance to the customer on identifying the network problem and simply shuts down the port and informs the customer that an error has occurred.
Therefore, the conventional technology is limited in its capabilities and suffers from at least the above constraints and deficiencies.